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How the Mars Curiosity Rover Works

On a hopeful evening in August 2012, a roomful of NASA employees held
their breath as they watched a rover named Curiosity attempt a landing
that was no short of a miracle. After what they dubbed the "seven
minutes of terror," the control room erupted with emotion as Curiosity's wheels safely touched the surface of Mars.
Curiosity rover will drive around the Gale Crater in a mission to
determine if Mars could ever support microbial life. This information
will serve as the foundation for possible manned missions to the Red
Planet.
Curiosity — who has assumed a female personality
on NASA's social networks — is different from the any other rover to
ever land on Mars. For starters, Curiosity is 10 feet long, 7 feet tall
and five times heavier than her predecessors Spirit and Opportunity,
twin rovers that NASA launched in 2003. To put it in more tangible
terms, Curiosity is about the same size as a Mini Cooper at 1,928
pounds.
No space is wasted on the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover. She is packed
with a cutting-edge scientific payload that allows her to explore Mars
like a human would. Here is a rundown of just some of the hardware that the rover uses on the mysterious Red Planet.

How Curiosity Snaps Photos of the Red Planet

If you've kept up with the latest news about Curiosity's findings,
you have probably seen the incredible, high-res images she has beamed
from the Red Planet. The rover uses 17 different types of cameras to
snap these images — in both black and white and color — and
high-definition video.
The first camera the rover used was her Mars Decent Imager (MARDI),
which was turned on as she completed her white-knuckle descent onto the
Red Planet. The 2-megapixel wide-angle camera recorded a full-color, HD video of that landing so that we can relive those seven minutes whenever we want.
Next up on the rover is the Mars Hand Lens Imager, which captures
extremely close-up images of things like soil, rocks and ice. Mounted on
Curiosity's arm, this camera is so advanced that it can reveal details
of materials that are smaller than the width of a human hair. Curiosity
has also used this camera to snap incredible self portraits.
Built at about human-eye level, Curiosity's Mars Science Laboratory
Mast Camera takes color photos and video of the rover's surroundings.
Essentially, this camera sees what she "sees" — the Red Planet terrain
or materials collected with the rover's arm, for example. This camera
can take incredible 360-degree panoramic views of Mars by stitching together images slowly taken in a rotating circle.

The Tools Curiosity Uses to 'Do the Science'

Curiosity's suite of instruments, called Sample Analysis at Mars
(SAM), analyzes material the rover collects using her arm. All of these
tools are used to complete her ultimate mission of assessing
carbon-based molecules — the building blocks of life — on the alien
planet.
For this instrument, Curiosity will deliver powdered samples to one
of two funnels on her "back" and then to small cups for processing
inside the rover's "body." The entire box is about the size of a
microwave oven and weighs about 88 pounds.
For studying Mars' atmosphere, Curiosity has a gas chromatograph, a
mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer with combined
capabilities to identify a wide range of organic compounds and determine
the ratios of different isotopes of key elements. To identify materials
in rocks and soils, Curiosity uses an on-board an X-ray diffraction and
fluorescence instrument called CheMin.
The rover uses an instrument named ChemCam to vaporize thin layers of
material from Martian rocks or soil targets up to 23 feet away. It took
eight years for the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National
Laboratory and France's national space and research agencies to build
the ChemCam. And Curiosity didn't waste anytime before firing it. Using
30 pulses of laser for 10 seconds, Curiosity blasted her first fist-sized rock called "Coronation" in August.
The rover first used SAM in early November. NASA released the initial results of those findings at the first of December. Despite a rumor that turned out to be a major misunderstanding, those first soil samples did not contain an "earth-shaking" discovery. However, the data did show that Martian soil is a complex makeup of water, sulfur and chlorine-containing substances.